Samsung’s “Galaxy S4” May be Announced Early Next Year, Sources Indicate

According to various sources, Samsung may opt to release the Galaxy S4 handset a lot quicker than expected. Uswitch and Korea Times suggest that the S3 successor will show up as soon as during February 2013 at “Mobile World Congress,” which is set in Barcelona, Spain. The earliest month that the handset may hit retail shelves is believed to be March/April 2013.

For those who simply can’t wait, the myriad of features rumored to show up include:

A much larger screen,possibly 5-inches (LatinoPost).

A next gen Exynos 5250/5450 processor with 4 Cortex A15 cores (2Ghz) and 8-coreMali-658 GPU(Uswitch).The processor will allegedly be manufactured with the 28nm manufacturing process, which will make the handset more power efficient.

On-Die LTE support (Uswitch)

An OLED display, which will allegedly use less power, giving the handset longer battery life (Automobile).

A choice of 8GB, 16GB, or 64GB storage capacity. Sources from Digital Daily have gone as far as to suggest that a possible 128GB model may be released.

3GB of RAM, as opposed to the current S3’s 1GB of RAM (Korea Times)

A 3200 mAH battery (LatinoPost and Korea Times)

Samsung, as of now, has declined to comment on either the rumored features or the supposed “European” announcement date. The company’s Galaxy S3 handset, it should be noted, is currently making more than just a good impact within the market, reportedly shipping 30 million units this year. Kim Yoo Chul, from the Korea Times, claimed that the S4 will not only be the Samsung’s most powerful handset in terms of hardware and software, it also will further “cement” Samsung’s leadership within the global smartphone industry.

We will have to wait until further announcements and details are confirmed to see if this is the case.